Science plus street smarts

Neuromarketing

Is your advertising doing its job?

What about your website, brochures, packaging?

Most businesses have a lot riding on their public communication, from ads to websites to social media. But leaders don’t know if their materials are really engaging their target audiences, no matter how much market research they do—because people cannot tell them.

Why? Because much of our buying (attending, voting, liking etc.) motivation is subconscious. Human behavior is often driven by emotional drivers functioning at a subconscious level that traditional market research simply cannot measure.

Enter Neuromarketing

Advances in neuroscience have given us a better way to understand what happens when people consume media. The application of neuroscience to marketing led to the birth of neuromarketing. Early research was often done with fMRIs, functional magnetic resonance imaging, that measured changes in brain activity by measuring blood flow.

This process led to many breakthroughs in understanding but, from a practical point of view, was expensive and clumsy. Most people didn’t take in TV, film, print or browse the internet with an expensive magnet around their heads.

There is a better, faster, cheaper way to find out what is happening in the brain and at a subconscious level: ask the body.

Biometric Research

Biometric research is a new development in neuromarketing that focuses on biological responses to media. These responses open the window to how ads—your ads—websites or any other media are influencing people. In short, the body tells us what’s going on in the brain.

When evaluating media with biometric research we can tell:

What people see—and what excites and draws their attention

Whether people are emotionally engaged by your media—and if so, whether they are positively engaged, negatively engaged, or both

Whether they are taking in your message

Their level of arousal, the key indicator of likelihood to act

Biometric research is paired with traditional market research so that we can integrate “self-report,” which creates a framework for trustworthiness and credibility, with key indicators of subconscious emotional response.

And that’s when things get interesting. In fact, that’s where you find out if your ads (websites, packaging, social media messages) are working or not. And if not, we will roll up our sleeves to help you get your ads back on track.

Scientific Measurements

We measure four indicators of biometric response.

Eye Tracking
Using a remote infrared eye tracker, we measure visual attention and arousal that tells what a person sees, or is drawn to by visual stimuli. We can also tell the level of excitement indicated by involuntary changes in pupil dilation.

Skin Conductance
A measure of arousal. Using a remote wrist band that measures galvanic skin response (GSR) we measure skin conductance, a measure of the intensity of sympathetic nervous system activity that occurs when an individual observes media.

Facial Recognition
Using a webcam, we measure the movement of facial muscles which indicate positive and negative emotional responses, or lack of emotional engagement.

Heart Rate
A measure of attention. Using a remote wrist band, we measure attention and whether the message is being encoded, that is, whether the message is being taken in.

In Sync

One of the problems in neuromarketing is coordinating the measurements. The hardware and software system we use integrates and plots all measurements simultaneously so that we can immediately see when and where a certain response or a cluster of responses occurs. We can match that with self-report—measures of memory, brand attitudes, intentions, values and life styles, media habits etc.—to yield a full-spectrum of analysis and recommendations.

What can we measure?

Any media that a person (aka “a consumer”) might be exposed to. This includes:

Call Us

Biometric research can be used as a standalone form of research or it can be integrated into your market research mix to solve important business problems.

Let us help you design your next research project. We have been using neuromarketing techniques (“Old Brain Communication”) since 2002. Today, we are working with two of the pioneers in the neuromarketing field, Steve Genco, Ph.D., primary author of “Neuromarketing for Dummies,” and Paul Bolls, Ph.D., Associate Director, Center for Communication Research at Texas Tech University, co-author of “Psychophysiological Measurement and Meaning.” Check out their bios: